Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we'll learn how to easily add realistic falling snow to a winter photo.

Call me crazy, but I love winter. Sure, it's not always easy to drive in, and scrapping ice off the car windshield is never fun. But to me, there's nothing better than waking up to a fresh blanket of snow covering the city, or hearing that crunching sound the snow makes under my boots, or watching the snowflakes glisten and sparkle under the street lights as I take my dog for a walk in the quiet calm of a cold winter night. Or maybe it's all just a shameful excuse to drink too much hot chocolate. Who knows.

Of course, as with any season of the year, getting Mother Nature to pose for our photos isn't always easy. You may have found the perfect winter landscape scene or snapped a great photo of your kids building their very first snowman, and the only thing that would have made the photo even better is if it had been snowing at the time, which of course, it wasn't. Fortunately, when the weather forecast fails us, Photoshop can still save the day. In fact, one of the great things about Photoshop is that if you focus on learning techniques rather than on memorizing steps, you'll soon discover that the same techniques can be used to create entirely different effects! In this tutorial, we're going to be adding falling snow to our photo, but if you've been following along with some of our other tutorials, you may recognize the technique we'll be using here, since we've used to same basic technique to add rain to a photo and to create a starry night sky. Memorizing steps can give you a serious case of tunnel vision in Photoshop, where all you ever see is what's directly in front of you. But when you focus on the techniques themselves, not the actual steps or the final results, and begin to understand the "why" behind what you're doing, you may just find yourself staring at something one day and thinking "You know, I bet I know how to do that in Photoshop!". Life after that will never be the same.

Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial:

Here's how it will look once we've added in our falling snow effect:

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Let's get started!

Step 1: Add A New Blank Layer

To begin, let's add a new blank layer above our photo. If we look in our Layers palette, we can see that our photo is sitting on the Background layer, which is currently the only layer we have. Click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. It's the icon second from the right, beside the Trash Bin:

Nothing will seem to have happened in the document window since the layer we just added has nothing on it yet, but if we look again in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a new blank layer, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1" for us, sitting directly above the Background layer:

Step 2: Fill The New Layer With Black

Now that we have our new layer, let's fill it with black. Normally, to do anything to a specific layer, we first have to select the layer in the Layers palette, but in this case, Photoshop has automatically selected our new layer for us, so we're good to go. We can tell that "Layer 1" is selected because it's highlighted in blue. To fill the layer with black, we'll use Photoshop's Fill command. Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fill:

This brings up the Fill command dialog box. At the top of the dialog box is the Contents section. This is where we tell Photoshop which color we want to use to fill the layer with. Choose Black from the list, then click OK to exit out of the dialog box:

Since "Layer 1" is sitting above our photo on the Background layer, filling "Layer 1" with black blocks our photo from view. The entire document window now becomes filled with black:

Step 3: Add Some Noise

Let's add some noise to this layer, which in just a few short steps will become our falling snowflakes. When most people hear the word "Noise", they immediately think of whatever music those darn teenagers are listening to these days, but in Photoshop, noise is actually nothing more than a whole bunch of little dots. Photoshop has a filter built specifically for adding noise to an image, and by sheer coincidence, it happens to be called the Add Noise filter. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Noise, and then choose Add Noise:

This brings up the Add Noise filter dialog box. Use the Amount slider in the middle of the dialog box to adjust the amount of noise that's being added. There's no specific amount to add for this effect, we just need a lot of noise. Dragging the slider to a value of around 150% or so should do the trick. At the bottom of the dialog box, select the Gaussian option, and way down at the very bottom, select the Monochromatic option, which will give us little black and white dots for our noise instead of the default red, green and blue dots:

Click OK when you're done and you'll see your document window fill with noise:

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